Did you always want kids?

This week I’m proud to share a guest essay from Maggie Frank-Hsu, who writes the Estranged Substack.

When I began this guest series, I wanted to share voices from mothers and non-mothers alike, and if estrangement or complicated mother-daughter relationships are part of that story, even better. This is a topic I explored in Season 1 of the Bad Mothers podcast, including with Maggie. In this essay, Maggie does such an amazing job weaving the big motherhood question with her understanding of her relationship with her mother — I hope you enjoy!

If you have an essay to share about being a mother, not being a mother, or trying to decide what’s best for you, please get in touch using the link at the end of this essay.

When you’re a woman, people ask you, “Do you want kids?” and then, after you have them, (if you do), they ask, “Did you always want kids?” And I don’t know how to answer.

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A memory: my mother and I are standing in the kitchen. She has to bend deeply at the waist to meet me at my level. I am 6 years old. It is a weekend afternoon in summer: she has poured old coffee from the morning brew into a highball glass of ice and cold milk. I say to her, “I want to have a baby by the time I am 20 so you’ll only be 60 and have plenty of time to be her grandma.”

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I didn’t end up having a baby at 20, thank god. But whenever these questions came up—”Do you want kids?” “Did you always want kids?”—I would return to this memory of us in the kitchen, my mother, the ice clinking in her glass, my declaration that I would have children, and this image would impel me to blurt, “I’ve always wanted children.” I’ve always wanted children, I would tell people, and it became true. In my young adulthood it was a relief, to want something without ambivalence. I knew I wanted them (someday, not right then). I was sure, even if I didn’t feel that way about anything else in my life.

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I aged. I still had trouble articulating, out loud, what I wanted. When I examined why, I realized my relationship to my own wanting was complicated. Throughout my life, I have rarely met a woman whose relationship to what she wants isn’t distorted by what others think she should want: her family, men, other women.

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I know that I was six years old in that memory because my grandmother—my mother’s mother—died when I was six. This small exchange must have happened right after she died in August. It was hot (hence the iced coffee). The memory is the same, but I’ve found its meaning has changed. I realize I was not declaring to my mother, at six years old, that I wanted to have children. I was telling her that I would have children so that she could enjoy them.

My mother had given birth to me right before turning 41. She had wanted children. Waiting had not been her choice. Six years later, my grandma was dead and would not see me grow up. At six, I sensed that my mother felt not just sad, but also guilty that she hadn’t had kids earlier so that my grandmother could have more time with them. What I see now is that I was reassuring her.

The memory is not of little-girl me having “always wanted children.” The memory is of a dynamic in my relationship with my mother. Whenever my mother was in pain, I ran the calculations I made about who I was and who I wanted to become through a complicated formula that prioritized her needs, aspirations, and preferences. At six, I had already spent years attuned to my mother’s feelings. When I sensed something was wrong, I didn’t know how to name the wrong thing, but I knew I was in charge of fixing it. My grandma would not see me grow up. Not to worry! I was communicating to my mother. I will not let that happen to you. I would have children early so she could spend as much time with them as possible. I would fix it.

That’s what “I’ve always known.” Not that I wanted children, but that I was in charge of making my mom feel better, and that I needed to steer—and, later on, stuff—my desires so that they could accomplish this goal.

Did I always want kids? Or had I just always wanted to fix what had gone wrong in the lives of the women before me?

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In “Testing,” a recently published short story by Min Jin Lee, a mother named Helen muses, “The bond between a mother and her child was binding, yet it had to be loosened. A mother had to love, and a child had to grow up. The results were often out of one’s hands.”

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Now I’ve been a mother for twelve years, and I want my children to stay in my life as they grow. But I don’t want them to feel that obligation to fix me, just as I am not here to fix them. As an adult, I’m able to parse the difference between what I want and what is best for my mother in a way that I wasn’t able to do when I was six. I am not trying to fix the lives of the women who came before me because I can’t fix them and it’s not my place to decide whether they need fixing.

What I can do is acknowledge the boundary between me and them. I want them to know their own desires in a way that I was not able to as a girl. I will have my opinions about their choices, but I want to raise kids who understand the difference between my opinion and their own, and who prioritize the latter. That is something I can give.

If you have an essay to share about being a mother, not being a mother, or trying to decide what’s best for you, please get in touch.